Commentary by Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Inspiration Striking

It was extraordinary, because I had never planned to write for children. Harry came to me immediately, as did the school and a few of the characters such as Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost whose head is not quite cut off. The train was delayed, and for hours I sat there thinking and thinking and thinking....The irony is I almost always have pen and paper; I write all the time. And on this one occasion when I had the idea of my life, I didn't have a pen. For four hours my head was buzzing. It was probably the best thing, because I ended up working the whole thing out before I got off the train.- J.K. Rowling, recalling when she was caught in a railway car between Manchester and London in 1980.[Source: "Eureka," an article by Mathew Honan and Nick Waplington in Wired, April 2008.]

2 Comments:

Although we have a sense of immediacy when it comes to writing things down, I've learned to let things simmer a bit. The original thought may be the meat, but you need time to develop the flavor. So although I myself might commit pen to paper on the spot, still takes me a while to convert it to bits and bytes. The original base ingredients are there but how they've changed....